You Stand Before Me Surrounded By Lights
by Gitana
Summary: Teenage Sam & Jo take a break from hunting to focus on each other.


**You Stand Before Me Surrounded By Lights**

**By:** Gitana  
**Word Count/Rating: **1,231; PG13  
**Disclaimer**: NOT Mine. His name is Eric Kripke.  
**Spoilers**: None, AU.  
**Characters/Pairing:** Sam/Jo  
**Summary:** Teenage Sam & Jo take a break from hunting to focus on each other.

* * *

At first Sam thinks it may be the glare of the sun playing tricks, her being cloaked by the shadow of things that are too far away. Somehow he makes out her shape as Jo half runs over to him--pale hair rippling behind her, sallow waves breaking up the burn of hot air with memories of spring, shaking the ground with her motion, breaking the light evenly. It's Christmas for the broken when he smiles at her, a year's worth of moonlight when she smiles back at him. Jo loves the surprise in his eyes when the connection is made: _Is it you? _

_It's me._

Everything is summer-hot, and the warm weather makes everything wet and sticky. It's only the second time Sam has seen Jo in a dress. The first time was the last time they saw each other; and she wore a white strappy dress, white flip flops and tiny knots of tangled hair behind her ears from being in bed the last few days. The pink bulbs of her cheeks betraying her by shining too bright, sending signals across the galaxy, to alien forms of life, to the meteors, to the peeking stars. If they can see, he can see; if they know, Sam knows, too. Her secret out in the open, outside the pages of the diary she doesn't have. He was nervous, too, but kept steady for the two of them.

"I'll see you soon," he said.

She nodded tacitly. Her shaky eyes giving her away completely, the words she was withholding that he could read off her face anyway. After a few seconds of silence she looked up at him with big, shiny eyes, and smiled. A small victory for whatever it was they had. Still, for Sam, it was strange seeing her like this - so uncharacteristically demure. Just the day before she challenged him to a run, the farthest distance you could run without breaking. Just the day before her long legs were draped over his torso as he carried her back to her motel room after she won. He had given up long before she stopped. His legs were fresh having sat on the ground waiting for her to turn around. He carried her away and she bounced up and down his shoulders with youthful abandon, trusting he wouldn't let her fall.

It was strange for her, too. Jo felt naked and exposed for what she really was behind the tough talk and collection of scars: a teenager. A fact obvious to everyone, but still a secret when it came to the normal things girls her age did and felt. Jo had a knife underneath her white dress, and Sam had a gun inside the waistband of his jeans. But right now, if anybody saw them, they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between them and every other sixteen and seventeen-year-old.

"Keep safe," he whispered. He couldn't help himself from reaching over to touch her face. The left corner of her mouth still swollen pink from the close call that left Jo breathless and terrified, and made her dad walk out on a hunt for the first time in his life.

Jo placed her hand over Sam's, caressing the wrinkled skin over his knuckles, the traces of fight. The faded memories of what they do, what can take him, or her, at any moment, and the reason why Jo tried so hard to control her trembling body to allow the moment to be. She swallowed all the doubts and all she ever promised herself about not needing anybody after seeing what losing Ellen did to her dad.

His fingers drizzled down her cheek like droplets of rain sliding down the thick glass of a window on a stormy night. Her small hand closed around his as he dropped his head down, her lips parted softly. Jo felt moistness on her upper lip, then Sam's mouth--soft, wet and careful--nudging gently, hovering over her mouth, pressing, but mindful of the cut skin threatening to crack and bleed if he touched it with anything more than a tender brush of lips.

:::

Her black sundress floats around her like a spaceship when the wind picks up, the hem rides up her thighs, and she lets it. Jo loves the rush of wind against her frame making her feel weightless and free. It feels like she's dreaming when he picks her up and holds her tight, like he had lost her long ago in another place, another time he can't remember, and she's here now, brushing the damp hair away from his eyes, uncaring of how sweaty he is. Free from the reins of reticence they breathe each other in - the sun and the summer on their skin.

Sam bounces her up with curiosity and Jo gives him a perplexed look before wrapping her legs around him.

"You're heavy," he says.

She smiles and nods. "I've been working out, been training more," she announces proudly. "My favorite part is all the eating."

Sam's favorite part is how she filled out perfectly. The evolution into adulthood already under way.

They sit on the grass with their legs crossed under them filling each other in, the spaces and moments of the two months they hadn't seen each other. The things they killed, and the blood they left on the ground.

Jo scoots over to Sam and places a hand to his sleek chest. He tilts his head, studies the two white scars across her neck, and starts there, mouthing her hard to leave bruises with happy memories on top of bruises from scary ones. He thinks he can make her forget, and after feeling the ablutionary sparks of his tongue, she's sure he can.

"I'm so sorry, I'm sweaty and disgusting," he blurts out.

"You're perfect," she says without opening her eyes.

She tugs at his black shirt, stuck to him, and pulls him closer. Sam holds her still, exploring her new dimensions. Jo can feel the contours of his body - the steady rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, the beat of his heart, so fast, just like hers, and it's almost like falling back into empty space. Like it felt seconds before everything went black: a sensation of warm liquid seeping out of her; blood, confusion, sleep. But this doesn't hurt though it makes her ache. It makes her dizzy. Her head is spinning, but she knows exactly where she is. When the music inside her head dies down she listens to what her body sounds like against his. Sam has both hands on the sides of her face, sucking the breath out of her, both relentless and careful. Jo runs her hand down Sam's back, slamming into the gun Sam keeps on himself at all times. She takes it out, lays it down on the grass, next to her pink shoes. He smiles and shrugs, covers the metal from the flares of the sun with her black socks.

There is always a reminder of who they are. One false move and Sam might not be waiting for her on the next state for the next job. It makes her sick, makes her want to throw up when the phone rings in the middle of the night with bad news. It makes her feel guilty when she buries her face on her pillow relieved it's not Sam, not Dean, not John - not anyone she cares about.

Jo wets and floods his lips with a song, purposely, Sam takes forever to learn the words. Sometimes, it's okay to go slow. A pretty corpse is still a corpse.

_the end_


End file.
